Haiti in Perpetual Crisis

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Mehran Kamrava is Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. A prominent scholar researching the political systems of the Middle East, in particular Iran, he also teaches comparative politics and political development.

His textbook, “Understanding Comparative Politics: A Framework for Analysis,” which I assign in one of my political science courses, explores the concept of political culture and its significance in understanding political systems.

We can apply many of his concepts to the Caribbean nation of Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, now an independent state for 220 years. Indeed, it is the second oldest nation in the western hemisphere after the United States.

Yet it remains in perpetual turmoil, a seemingly permanent failed state. The underlying assumption is that Haitians cannot manage their own affairs. The government is corrupt or ineffective or both.

But is that the whole story? History says otherwise. Even after two centuries, Haiti has rarely, if ever, been allowed to manage its own affairs.

Haiti had been a French colonial possession with perhaps the most brutal plantation system built on the enslavement of Africans. Between 1697 and 1804, French colonists brought 800,000 slaves to what was then known as Saint-Domingue to work on the vast plantations, accounting for seven percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

It wrested its independence from France in a revolution during the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Napoleon had tried to destroy them, but the Haitians won. He lost more troops than he did at Waterloo and withdrew.

Yet few countries got off to as inauspicious a start as Haiti. It remained surrounded by British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonies where slavery remained legal and so it was shunned by European powers.

France, reluctantly, after failing to recapture the country, finally acknowledged Haitian sovereignty. But it demanded the then enormous sum of 150 million francs in return for “losing” its colony.

The debt was not paid off in its entirety until 1947. Haiti became the first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid the families of their former masters for generations. Some economists called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.”

At the same time, the United States, the only other independent republic in the Americas, was wary of a free “Negro republic,” whose example might encourage rebellions by its own enslaved people. Succeeding U.S. presidents refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, when Abraham Lincoln, during the American Civil War against the slave-holding southern Confederacy, established an American Legation to the country.

Even then, Washington treated Haitian sovereignty very cavalierly. It sent the U.S. Marines to govern the country in 1915 and they remained until 1934. In some years, more of Haiti’s budget went to paying the salaries and expenses of the American officials who controlled its finances than to providing health care to the entire nation, then around two million people.

It has intervened militarily a number of times since then, for example restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, three years after he had been exiled in a coup.

In the 1950s the U.S. acquiesced in the establishment of a brutal dictatorship under the reign of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, when thousands died of disease, starvation and torture. It lasted until his death in 1971, when he was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The latter was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986.

A succession of ineffectual leaders, often deposed by violence, followed over the next four decades. Fourteen presidents have ruled the country, some for only days, since then. Haiti has been in even greater turmoil since the assassination of the most recent president, Jovenel Moise, in 2021.

Such is the background to the gang warfare that has now broken out, reducing the state to near anarchy. Ironically, it may take Africans to help quell the violence.  A force of 1,000 Kenyan police are to be dispatched to Haiti under a directive from the United Nations to restore order.